language must be freed from obsolete conventions and made a more rational and useful organ, for the benefit of all, had its origin in the rationalism of the eighteenth century.
Men's minds were dominated by a highly abstract conception of the equality of all human beings, an equality not only of rights but of nature. They were so entirely possessed with this notion that they would not concede the existence of deep-seated racial and individual differences. Neither would they acknowledge the strength of historical conditions, the power of habit and convention, or the modifying influence of natural environment. They ignored the fact that in the development of a people there is an unbroken chain of cause and effect, each event following naturally from the preceding one, so that a nation's present is but the fruit of its past. Since all men are equal , they thought, every law which does not recognise that equality must be altered.
In this work of reform only pure common sense or reason was to be consulted. Whatever conflicted with pure reason must be transformed. All the most weighty institutions, such as religion, the State, the constitution, and moral laws, they urged, were based on convention. But things created by convention can also be changed by a fresh convention as soon as reason finds it advisable. Was not religion invented by the priests, kingship by tyrants, the state by the aristocrats, and language by a few of our intelligent ancestors? Why, then, should not these obsolete institutions be replaced by others?
Kazinczy's language-reforming plans were based upon a similar highly speculative and rationalistic notion. He considered the whole of the existing language, with
